The Ronda Rousey you see today is not the same person she's always been.

The New York Post reports in her new tomem "My Fight/Your Fight," the woman recently named Most Dominant Athlete Alive reflects on a time she regularly started her morning with a smoke and a vodka espresso. Soon after that, she developed a pot-and-Vicodin habit so ravaging it left her sleeping in her car, desperately trying to deal with all the depression she felt over the suicide death of her beloved father, Ron.

"The way I got here wasn't perfect," the 28-year-old, undefeated MMA champ now openly shares. "It was messy, and there was a lot of s- -t along the way."

Ronda Rousey was born in Riverside County, California, with an umbilical cord wrapped around her neck and so blue in the face with hypoxia she couldn't speak until she was 4 years old.

"At about 6, I began speaking coherently in sentences," she recalls. "They told me I had brain damage from the hypoxia. But when you're a kid, your brain figures out a way to reorganize."

Beyond all her trials and tribulations, Rousey attributes a lot of her toughness to her mother, a sixth-degree black belt judo champ who became the first American to win the world championships.

In some ways, she longed to follow in her mom's footsteps; her mother would become her first coach. A torn ACL, broken right hand, broken nose and dislocated elbow later, Rousey saw an MMA fight highlight on TV and instantly thought to herself, "I could totally do that."

The rest is history, with Rousey seriously beginning training sometime around 2010. Her MMA career took off when she had an epiphany in her first fight and was forward-thinking enough to combine her judo skills with her MMA training to come up with her now practically lethal legendary arm bar hold.

Using the move, she won her first fight in 25 seconds.

"From this day on, I'm just going to break everybody's f**king arm," she told herself."

It's all left Rousey dabbling between the worlds of world-class, niche athlete and mainstream superstar. In recent times, she's appeared in such films as "The Expendable 3, "Furious 7" and in the upcoming "Entourage" and as a sex symbol on the pages of such magazines as ESPN and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

After a period of just earning $400 per fight, she now maxes out at up to $1 million per pay-per-view event. Now, Rousey is expressing a willingness to take on the responsibility for assuring the very survival of female MMA events.